2009 – Page 11

27 Mar 2009

company, e-government, technology

directgov, firefox, microsoft

Search tools for Directgov: Puffbox vs Microsoft

Directgov has announced a ‘partnership’ with Microsoft, promising to make it ‘easier than ever to find government information and services online’. In practice, this means they’re using the new ‘accelerator’ feature in Internet Explorer v8: you can select some text on any web page, then right-click to access a ‘search Directgov’ link which fires that word directly into the Directgov search engine as a search query. I don’t think it’ll be life-changing for anyone, and my suspicion is that there’s more in it for Microsoft than Directgov – but hey, it’s not a bad thing.

But how many people are using IE8? What about the much greater number of people using, say, IE7… or Firefox? Puffbox to the rescue! I’ve thrown together a quick search plugin for Directgov, which will allow you to search Directgov directly from the browser interface. ~~You will have to do the copying and pasting manually though, so apologies for the lack of acceleration.~~

And if you’re using Firefox, and you happen to have Directgov selected as your browser-bar search engine at the time – behold! you’ll have the same ‘search Directgov’ option in your right-click menu! (Thx to Stuart in the comments.)

Visit this page on the MozDev website to find Puffbox’s brand new Directgov search plugin. Click on the word Directgov, and it’ll ask you if you want to install – say yes. If you then consult the list of search engines available from your browser’s built-in search box, you should now see a Directgov option. Enter a word, and it’ll take you straight to a search query for that word.

Puffbox principal consultant Simon Dickson said: ‘Directgov is taking advantage of long-established capabilities within Internet Explorer 7, and better alternatives such as Firefox, to make it easier for members of the public to find information on the Directgov website – whether they realise it or not. Directgov is among the forward-thinking organisations using modern technologies to benefit their target audience, and we are delighted to be helping them.’

I’ll link to the Directgov newsroom article as soon as it’s been posted.
26 Mar 2009

politics

derekdraper, guidofawkes, labourlist

When two blogs go to war

In the red corner, fighting out of Berkeley, California, the challenger – Derek Draper. His opponent, heavyweight champion of the Blogosphere, Paul ‘Guido’ Staines. Your referee for this afternoon’s contest is Mr Andrew Neil.

When the BBC’s Daily Politics finally brought two of political blogging’s most inflammatory characters face to face, sparks inevitably flew: see the full five minute interview here. It wasn’t especially enlightening: really just a chance to reheat the old, and frankly embarrassing playground spats of the past couple of months. That’s fine for a self-proclaimed ‘anti-politician’ like Staines; but not for someone like Draper, who’s supposedly trying to do something more edifying.

I was bemused by Derek’s continuing efforts to present LabourList as independent of the party, particularly this exchange on funding:

AN: Who finances you?

DD: Well, we publish every year who finances us…

AN: Who does?

DD: Well, we haven’t published it yet.

Or this remarkable about-turn:

DD: The blog is a collection of individuals…

AN: You don’t have a collective view?

DD: No, of course not! LabourList sometimes posts as LabourList…

AN: So it does have a view?

DD: Yeah, it has a view.

Then, as the interview approached a conclusion, Derek tries to turn the funding questions back on Staines: ‘When you set up Order Order, you were just out of being bankrupt, or a bankrupt. So where did the money come from?’ What, to set a rudimentary blog at Blogspot.com, Derek? To buy a domain name? And a Skype account? Actually, that statement probably reveals a lot about the Labour Party’s approach to internet activity. I’ll say no more.

Meanwhile, on the respective blogs, it’s getting very ugly. LabourList chose today to publish a dossier on Paul Staines, detailing ‘a shocking story of bankruptcy, law-breaking and friendliness towards the BNP’ – at least two of which, I’d have said, are totally irrelevant. Meanwhile, Staines has been out to California to do some dirt-digging into Draper’s educational background, with disappointing results both in terms of the lack of a confirmed allegation, and the quality of his video. Interestingly, for the first time I think, Staines has cast aside the Guido persona for both today’s TV slot and his YouTube video… continuing his journey into the mainstream media. One wonders where he’s heading?
25 Mar 2009

e-government

blogs, fco

British Ambassadors' blogging excellence

It’s almost ten years since I left the Foreign Office, but it’s always nice to be back. This time, I’m a guest at a roundtable seminar featuring some of their – actually, to be fair, some of the country‘s – leading bloggers. The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones chairs proceedings.

I’m struck by the different takes on what it means to be an Ambassador who blogs. Alex Ellis, HMA Lisbon and Mark Kent, HMA Hanoi both admit to doing it (at least in part) for marketing purposes, promoting British values of democracy and dialogue, challenging the safari-suited stereotype – and both, it’s worth noting, writing in the local language. John Duncan, the Geneva-based Ambassador for Multilateral Arms Control & Disarmament has been blogging for years, and uses it to influence a small and very narrowly defined audience. David Warren, HMA Tokyo says he’s a relative novice, and is doing a bit of both, with one blog in English, and another in Japanese.

There’s something truly wonderful about hearing senior British diplomats talk proudly of being bloggers. But as the conversation progresses, it strikes me that the Foreign Office is natural territory for the blogging policy official. For hundreds of years, London simply had to trust the Ambassadors overseas to ‘do the right thing’: there’s no culture of ‘command and control’, certainly not at Ambassadorial level, to work around. They’re lucky.

Engagement with a community, usually but not always defined geographically, is absolutely fundamental to an Ambassador’s job description. To the usual toolkit of press notices, speeches, meetings and conferences, we now add ‘blog’. So I’m genuinely quite surprised by the slightly hostile tone of some contributions from the floor, questioning their ‘authenticity’. To me, it’s totally authentic, it’s totally inherent to the job.

How do they assess their success? For a couple, they are among the first bloggers in their respective countries, which should score a few credibility points for UK plc. Some quote instances where a particular post gets hundreds of comments; but there are more examples of cases where the blog has led to something else: coverage in traditional media, reaching many times further than the blog itself, or personal contacts made. (I must admit, I’m reaching a similar conclusion myself. It’s not about who comes to the blog, it’s about where the blog takes me.)

I haven’t yet mentioned the FCO’s star blogger, Philip Barclay from Zimbabwe, recently named among the UK’s top 100. His situation feels slightly different: for a start, he’s a mere Second Secretary, not an Ambassador. More pertinently, his stuff tends to be much more journalistic, reportage-y, emotional frankly than his more senior colleagues. But as a Brit working in a country where British journalists are banned, he has special reason to do so: and in doing so, he’s symbolising British values as regards freedom of the press. That’s probably reason enough in itself, never mind the fact that his writing (and, he’s quick to point out, that of his colleague Grace) is so good, so compelling.

There’s little scepticism in the room, but then again, perhaps there are no sceptics in the room. I come away feeling that the FCO is approaching this in the right way: fitting its blogging into long-established organisational culture, having fun with it, but keeping an eye on its contribution to wider organisational objectives. Sadly though, I fear its unique position means it isn’t a useful precedent for the rest of Whitehall.

Here’s what Rory thought on his way out:

Listen!
24 Mar 2009

company, e-government

governanceofbritain, ournhs, wordpress

Flying the nest

As I’ve written before, one of the (many) selling points of WordPress is the lack of lock-in. When the time comes for a client to take greater control of a project, or if they simply feel it’s time for a change, they aren’t stuck with all their content locked in a proprietary CMS. They’re free to export their content, and take it elsewhere – to a new WordPress expert, to a new theme, to a whole new existence.

And in a further sign of the maturity of WordPress in the marketplace, I’ll be waving goodbye to a couple of my earliest WordPress projects; I’ll also be bringing in a couple of new ones from other people.

Governance of Britain has been tweaked by someone many of you will know – but since he/she hasn’t mentioned the work publicly yet, I won’t name names. It’s been rebranded as People, Power and Politics, and features a much more web-friendly design, and the sort of ‘web 2.0’ integration that simply wasn’t practical, or even possible when the site was first built 18 months ago. I really like what’s been done with it, in a remarkably short space of time – and I wish it well. For various reasons – some practical, some political – the site didn’t really work out as we hoped. I’m hoping the new manager, located closer to the heart of things, can take it further than I could.

There are also moves to breathe new life into the Our NHS, Our Future website, mothballed since the publication of last summer’s big NHS review; again, it’ll be an internal team taking greater ownership of things. It looks like the site will be more ambitious in some ways, less so in others, and with a different, more internal-NHS focus than last time. I’ve been helping the new team with the various technicalities and practicalities; launch is a little way away, but the early signs are encouraging.

Part of me is naturally sad to see them go; but since the Puffbox cause has been to encourage government to make more use of tools like WordPress, I have to put it down as a Mission Accomplished: my work there is done. And to be perfectly honest, it’s quite a relief to free up some space – albeit temporarily! – in my diary. I’ve had more offers of work lately than I could ever fulfil; and I’ve got three major projects on the go just now, which take us well beyond the straightforward ‘WordPress as CMS’ notion. I can’t wait to tell you about them.
23 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

downingstreet, jasoncalacanis, twitter

No10's Twitter status worth $250,000?

By getting involved early and enthusiastically in the whole Twitter thing, has DowningStreet earned itself $250,000 of free digital engagement? Well-known internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis (number of followers: 63,000) has offered Twitter a cool quarter of a million bucks – as I believe our American friends would describe it – to secure himself a two-year stay on their list of people you might like to follow when you open a new account. This is, of course, the same list which has done so much to boost DowningStreet’s follower count, now standing at 276,000.

There’s breathless excitement in a piece on TechCrunch:

[Calacanis] wants to lock in the price now because he thinks it is a great marketing opportunity. It is not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers every day. That comes to 3.6 million a year, and even if half unsubscribe, that is still a direct channel to more than a million potential customers. Those are customers who feel a connection with you because of the personal nature of Twitter messages.

There’s additional detail in John Naughton’s piece from yesterday’s Observer:

“I was only half-bluffing with this move,” he wrote in his weekly newsletter. “I was 90% sure Twitter wouldn’t take the money and I wouldn’t have to pony up …. However, if they did call my bluff … I would have gotten what I wanted: two to 10 million Twitter followers and the ability to drive one to two million visits to Mahalo a month from Twitter.”

This is a serious entrepreneur, a guy who has made serious money from the internet, reckoning that $120,000 for one year, or $250,000 to cover himself for the likely price rise in year two, was good value to buy something which 10 Downing Street already owns. One wonders, then, whether Francis Maude might want to reconsider his comments about No10’s experimentation with ‘the latest digital gimmicks’?
19 Mar 2009

e-government, technology

coi, jquery, opensource

The implications of free

I’m in the early stages of spec’ing up a new site build. The client helpfully provided a wireframe sketch of the homepage, which included – deep breath – a news ticker. And for the first time in living memory, I haven’t recoiled in horror. In fact, I’m quite happy to give it to them.

Previously, my response would have been to open up a cost-vs-benefit discussion. In my experience, people (arguably the less web-literate?) like to see tickers, but they don’t actually ever use them. So is it worth me programming a function nobody really wants, just so you can pretend to be the BBC? Maybe, maybe not. Generally speaking, the ticker idea soon falls off the mockups.

But the new reality is that it’ll take me a matter of a few minutes to program. I’ll use WordPress to generate a normal HTML bullet-list. I’ll include a reference to the fantastic (free) JQuery javascript library – if there isn’t one already, and these days, there probably will be. Then I’ll include one of several free JQuery ‘plugins’ to do ticker functionality: probably this one. Then we’ll have a ticker. A couple of lines of CSS to pretty it up, and we’re done. Yes folks, that really is all there is to it.

Suddenly, any approach based on cost-benefit analyses goes out the window. The cost is virtually zero, so if there’s any potential benefit to be derived from doing something, the test is passed. That doesn’t mean we should throw everything at any given project; but it does mean we might as well drop it in, and see if it works.

For me, this is the challenge of the Open Source Era for big corporate clients like government. Procurement and project management processes have been built up to handle projects costing millions. We spend huge amounts of money ensuring that we don’t waste all the money. But what if the cost of the job is zero, or something close to it?

This is why I’m bit perplexed by COI’s new WordPress-based 🙂 consultation on Improving Government Websites. There’s a huge section on measuring costs: they’re suggesting you might/should report an associated cost against each of nearly 200 activities. But how can you put a cost against something like (for example) RSS feeds in a WordPress build, when they’re built-in, in numerous different ways, whether you like it or not?
18 Mar 2009

politics

election, libdems, thatcham

Reality check: democracy inaction

Every now and again, you come across something which reminds you that, for all our great progress in e-politics, we still can’t do some of the absolute basics.

Tomorrow there’s a by-election where I live: the Thatcham South and Crookham ward of Thatcham Town Council. It’s not a big deal, perhaps, but it’s another chance for democracy to get some exercise. I received my polling card, and I was interested to find out what I could do with it.

To their credit, the Lib Dems have made a serious (offline) effort. We’ve had a couple of badly DTP’ed newsletters, a quite convincing pseudo-handwritten letter from the outgoing councillor, and a couple of knocks on the door in the very recent past. Plus, they’ve picked a candidate who rejoices in the name Marvellous Ford. A name you won’t forget, although not ideal for search engine optimisation.

But that’s all we’ve received, from anyone. So, who else is standing? I genuinely haven’t been able to find out. Nothing on the award-winning local paper website, or on the BBC site, or (that I’ve seen) in the various freesheets we get through the door. Nothing on the local Tory party website: I’m not even sure they’re putting anyone up. (There’s nothing on the local LibDem site either, actually.) Nothing on the town council website, apart from a PDF telling me there’s going to be an election. Nothing on the local authority website, under whose auspices the election takes place. Nothing coming up on Google.

Tomorrow I’ll do my civic duty. I’ll make my way to the polling station, and cast my vote. I will be doing so in complete ignorance of the choice being offered to me. And that, folks, is a bad bad thing.
17 Mar 2009

e-government

api, cabinetoffice, jobs, rss

Civil Service jobs API: five years in the making

Five years ago – to the very minute, as it happens! – I was working on a proposal to put to someone at the Cabinet Office. I was still working at ONS, and was trying to think of a clever way to handle our job adverts. We were obliged to post details of all vacancies into the (very recently departed) Civil Service Recruitment Gateway website. So I thought, what if that site could feed our vacancies back to us?

I approached the Cabinet Office with a proposal to not only help them spec up the work, but to pay for it. I’ve still got the PowerPoint slides I produced for the ‘pitch’.

Click to view slide-by-slide

Five years ago, this was truly visionary stuff – in effect, an open API on all government jobs, way beyond anything that had been done before. And even though I’d documented the whole thing, even though I was putting up the money myself for them to do it, to build a function for everyone to use freely… it never happened. An all too familiar story. So it’s especially amusing to see Steph’s news, exactly five years on, of Civil Service jobs, your way.

Given the enduring popularity of job search online, this is an exciting development for a major government data set. It should provide something which third party developers can use to derive valuable commercial services to their customers, as well as helping to ensure Government broadens the reach of its recruitment at lower cost, facilitating the creation of innovative new services based on public data. With luck, it’s the business case for APIs to government data that we’ve been looking for.

Now admittedly, my proposal was a modest affair based on a straight-down-the-line RSS feed. There were few specific references to XML, never mind API, and certainly not RDFa. But reading Steph’s piece, and the ensuing comments, I can see a direct line between my 2004 proposal – which, let’s be honest, is ancient history in online terms – and today’s unveiling. If you ever wanted a precise metric for how slowly government moves, there it is.

Regardless of the history, it’s an excellent piece of work by the Cabinet Office team; and – I hope – having done the donkey work to set it up, someone is ready to take it to market, and make people aware of what the service can do for them. Some relatively straightforward PHP or ASP would be enough to put an automated list of all current vacancies on each department’s own homepage; perhaps the Cabinet Office team could go a step further, and deliver it via a Javascript-to-PHP call (as the LibDems do for their ‘campaign buttons‘), making it child’s-play for the recipient site. The requirement to obtain an API key doesn’t help their cause, though.
13 Mar 2009

e-government

comicrelief, dfid, downingstreet

Civil servants are people too

Nice to see Downing Street getting into the spirit of Red Nose Day… Well done to those responsible, I know who you are. 😉

I’ve never quite decided whether or not it’s appropriate for government sites to do things like putting up ‘Christmas decorations’; I think I’m OK with it, as long as it’s professionally done. Opinions, anyone?

And while we’re on the subject of Comic Relief… full marks for opportunism go to DFID blogger Emily Poskett: her post about meeting the various celebs climbing Kilimanjiro has made for record traffic levels on the site. The page in question is coming very high up the Google search rankings for several obvious queries. Is there anything wrong with using a popular culture hook for a story about government aid activity? – no, not in my book.
10 Mar 2009

e-government

google, guardian, ons, statistics

Guardian Data Store: threat to ONS or its saviour?

When I first saw reports of the Guardian’s new Data Store ‘open platform’, my heart sank. In a former life, I ran the web operation at the Office for National Statistics; I resigned in June 2004, when frustration started to turn to anger. I’ve still got a copy of my resignation letter, in which I wrote:

I have always maintained that the agenda of openness which I espoused is not a choice; it is a reality forced upon us by the modern communication environment. The general public’s expectations have moved on dramatically in the last decade [1995-2004]. Sadly, this [realisation] has not been shared by other parts of the Office on whom my work or resourcing have been dependent.

I warned them that someone would come along, do a better job than they were doing, and supplant them as the ‘primary source’. Once that happened, the statistical sanctity so jealously guarded by the priesthood of statisticians could very easily be compromised. In effect, to preserve the status quo, things had to change. (The message went unheeded, by the way: the six-month ‘stopgap’ site I introduced is soon to celebrate its seventh birthday.)

So today, the Guardian unveiled their Data Store. Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger is absolutely clear about the service’s purpose:

Publishing data has got easier [since 1821] but it brings with it confusion and inaccessibility. How do you know where to look, what is credible or up to date? Official documents are often published as uneditable pdf files – useless for analysis except in ways already done by the organisation itself.

Just to be clear, ONS: that’s you he’s talking about. It’s expressed even more starkly in an accompanying blog post by Simon Rogers, subtitled: ‘Looking for stats and facts? This is now the place to come.‘ A quick look down the data on offer reveals a high proportion, a majority perhaps, to be ONS or other HMG data. Their tanks are on your lawn, guys.

Now I’m not for one minute suggesting the Guardian would do anything malicious. I’m simply warning of the uncomfortable position where an outside entity – indeed, in this case, one with an explicit political slant – becomes the gatekeeper to (supposedly) pure statistical data. Can we rely on them to be as comprehensive, as conscientious, as religious in their devotion to updates, corrections and revisions? No, admits Simon Rogers: ‘it is not comprehensive… this is selective’.

So is this the Doomsday Scenario I predicted? Not quite, not yet. How exactly are the Guardian serving up the data?

We’ve chosen Google Spreadsheets to host these data sets as the service offers some nice features for people who want to take the data and use it elsewhere [in] a selection of output formats including Excel, HTML, Acrobat PDF, text and csv. A key reason for choosing Google Spreadsheets to publish our data is not just the user-friendly sharing functionality but also the programmatic access it offers directly into the data. There is an API that will enable developers to build applications using the data, too.

You read that right: the actual mechanics are as basic as: uploading/copying existing Excel spreadsheets, converting/pasting them into Google Docs spreadsheets (price: £0 for 5000 reasonably-sized files), and letting the Google functionality do the rest. By way of example, data on England’s population by sex and race. The Guardian offers this Google Spreadsheet. Now download this Excel file from the ONS website, and look at the sheet labelled ‘Datasheet’. Actually, let me save you the bother: they’re identical.

Cabinet Office minister Tom Watson writes on his blog: ‘Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up.’ The answer is, the few seconds it takes to sign up for a Google account, and maybe an hour of copy-and-paste. So, tomorrow lunchtime, then.

This afternoon, I thought this was a disaster for ONS’s future. I’ve changed my mind. The Guardian’s move sets a precedent, and lays down a direct, unavoidable challenge. It could actually be ONS’s salvation.